Cool Ones and Lame Ones

It’s not surprising that the West Asheville community is protesting and boycotting the coffee shop — especially the female members of it, who learned on Twitter that they’re not human beings so much as “an endless supply of hot young pussy,” or that “there are no ‘special’ girls,” merely “cool ones and lame ones.” The lames ones, according to the Holistic Game blog, “could help themselves immensely by reading a few classic novels and working out a little [but] they get attention regardless, so the motivation to better themselves isn’t present.”

So, let me get this straight. Two men create a successful business selling coffee but at the same time take to the internet to brag about how they use their business to pick up women for casual sex.

This is a failure of business ethics. But bragging about picking up women wasn’t enough for these two entrepreneurs they also had to explain that what’s important about women are some of their component parts and whether or not the “experience” they provided was good enoughto be chalked up as another story to be told online.

Just wonderful.

Maybe this is one of the grey areas I hear so much about? I am told that business ethics is full of morally ambiguous situations where educated minds can differ. That is just nonsense. Most business ethics problems are simple and straightforward tales of good vs. evil.

Do you find much moral ambiguity in this one? Two entrepreneurs build a business, use business to get sex, post online about the women in a thoroughly disgusting and denigrating manner – business suffers. Where’s the moral complexity here?

How about the other stories today?

We’ve got a former hedge fund manager increasing the price of a lifesaving drug by a mind numbing amount, a food distributor sent to prison for 28 years for shipping contaminated food for years and we have an automobile manufacturer evading air pollution standards for millions of its cars by manipulating the software. Does any of that strike you as morally ambiguous?

James Pilant

P.S. If you go to the Salon article in full, they have links to the web sites the men posted on. I don’t recommend it. The phrase, “degrading to women,” does not capture the full flavor of their writings. These are not gentlemen.